“You use Git to take snapshots of all the files in a folder.”

Alice Bartlett

• Repository - your project folder
• Commit - a snapshot of your folder
  • We use push to send the snapshots online
  • And pull to retrieve an updated snapshot
• Branch - a working version of your folder

• For Windows, download the executable here
• On a mac type git --version in your terminal
• On linux machines type sudo apt install git-all in your terminal

Note that you may need admin rights on your computer, without these you’ll need to request an install.

GitHub offers a range of account types. A free account is available for organisations and individuals.

Even if you’re in an institution, create a personal GitHub account to keep track of you own work.

You’ll find more information, and links for creating an account, here.

• Follow the instructions here to create your first repository

• Some key files to include:

  README - ideally format this as a markdown md file (more info here and here)
  

  LICENSE - how you want people to re-use your code (info)
  

  .gitignore - names of any files in your project you don’t want on GitHub (templates)
  

• Rstudio does a lot of the hard work for you
• You can use the terminal, if you like
• Here are some screenshots showing you how to link a GitHub repository to RStudio

• Introduction to GitHub presentation (slides and video)
• All you need to know about GitHub in their help pages
• Detailed book about git, GitHub and R (here)
• Detailed overview of RStudio, git and GitHub (here)
• A game to help us think about git branches (here)
• ONS GitHub introductory course (here)